I just wanted people to hear the sounds and fall in love and not overthink it. You get a 12-year-old and you'll get a 55-year-old standing next to each other in the audience. They're from different eras of music but they'll feel the same way.
I'm a marketing guy at my core. If I wasn't doing music, I would still be introducing ideas on how I like branding and marketing.
I make music in terms of collections.
I say I design music. I can imagine it and sort of picture it. I think about all of the things I do in the world and say that I'm designing it because it takes the same skill set.
There's no better feeling than when I go outside and I see the faces of people who paid their money just to see me, that tells me the music is going where it's supposed to and that's encouraging.
I grew up in a church. My mom is a minister so she would make us go to every possible church she could muster.
I had a good start. I did a record with Beyonce. I did a record with Lenny Kravitz. I put out my second collection of music and then my second collection of clothes.
There's no real music scene in Guyana, but there's a music space. So there's no scene because there's no economy for it, but there's a space because everything that spills over dancehall and reggae, spills over.
My mom made me read a ton of books, so I got good at words and understood the English language. So when I started rapping, words were something I knew. I learned how to manipulate them so that I could say whatever I wanted to say.
I like musk and oud in a really, really delicate way. Because sometimes, if there's too much oud, it just smells like you're in the back of a cab in Harlem and I can't do it.
I was never afraid to try female products. I didn't believe in those gender identities as it related to products.
I think it's challenging trying to describe my sound. Not because I'm making some experimental martian music, but because it's a little broader. The things that you've heard are only fragments and small fractions of what you're going to hear.
I don't think of myself as just a rapper. But overspending on sneakers? That's a real rapper thing to do.
I make these songs for me. That's the truth. I make them because that's what I want to hear. Long before you ever hear it, believe that I'm in a Porsche with the top off listening to it.
If I say I'm rich enough times and enough people say it back to me, I gotta be rich, right?
